The Cartographers(8)

It was the leather portfolio, she was certain. Hovering near the top, three embossed letters would be clinging to the last flecks of gold leaf: TJY.

Tamara Jasper-Young.

It originally had belonged to her mother. After she died, Nell’s father took to using it, as a way to remember her. That was another thing he’d promised—that one day this portfolio, the only keepsake of her mother, would also be lovingly passed to her.

As a child, it had held almost magical power to Nell. She used to watch him slip it into and out of his briefcase when he went to work or came home in the evening, trying to imagine what beautiful work could lie inside. There were other maps he brought home too, but those came in clear plastic sleeves or cardboard folders. Only the most valuable, the most rare, of them were carried in the leather portfolio. Nell always begged to see what was inside when she spied it, because she knew it would be something special. She wondered at all of the priceless maps she must have laid eyes on as a small girl that she couldn’t even remember now. The things she’d seen every day over breakfast or before her evening bath that adults would have had to devote years of research to in order to gain access. Long after they’d stopped talking, she had sometimes thought of the portfolio, about the things he still carried inside it.

And now here it was. Hidden in the mess.

Lieutenant Cabe was still at the door beside his partner, the two of them giving instructions to the rest of the employees in the corridor, and Swann was over at the bookcase, plucking tissues gently out of a box to bring back to Nell.

For a split second, no one was looking at her.

Before she could think about what a huge mistake it would be, how much trouble it could get her into, Nell slipped the portfolio out from the compartment and into her already stuffed tote bag in one smooth motion and returned her hand to the top of the desk.

“Everything all right?” Swann asked when he turned back around.

“As all right as it can be,” she replied.





III




By the time Nell had clamored up the old, creaking staircase to the fifth floor and wedged herself through the door into her apartment, it was after ten o’clock at night. Her stomach was growling, having missed both lunch and dinner, but she ignored it. She kicked the door closed and turned the lock, then collapsed in a heap onto the kitchen table with all of her belongings.

The rest of the day had been nothing short of torture. Nell had spent hours answering Lieutenant Cabe’s endless questions and accepting Swann’s comfort, the whole time not daring to open her bag to take out her spare granola bar, or phone, or even her lip balm, lest she draw attention to what was also inside. After Lieutenant Cabe had finally let her go, she’d had to return to Classic, where Humphrey had told her she was now on bereavement leave for the rest of the week. She’d argued that she didn’t need it, but family was family, he’d said, and refused to believe she was fine. He was from a gigantic one, several generations all crammed together in the same ancient house on Long Island.

Even after boarding the subway home, she still hadn’t dared to take out the portfolio, not yet. When she’d slipped it from the desk into her tote bag, she’d been able to tell by the feel and weight of it that there was only one thing inside: a single medium-thick folded paper—which of course meant a map.

It was the famous Young portfolio. It could be nothing else.

Nell’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment as she finally opened her tote bag and reached in. She couldn’t believe she’d actually taken it from his desk. Never had she been so brazen, and possibly slightly criminal. Whatever was inside was probably library property.

She tried not to think about that part as she wriggled her hands into a pair of clean dish gloves from under the sink. She’d grown up with the man, known his passion and his work too intimately to have ignored such an important artifact hidden among the mess. Had he located a rare, previously unknown copy of a historical set? Had he convinced a billionaire to donate a priceless piece to the NYPL? Whatever it was, it would be incredible. Even if she could replay the day, she’d still have snatched the portfolio all over again, to see what was inside.

And now she was about to find out.

With a thrill, Nell eased open the leather cover.

She stared for several seconds.

“What?” she finally managed.

Nell had been imagining something old, or astoundingly rare, and most likely controversial. A disputed maritime routes map or an early diagram of Brooklyn, prebridge. Something worthy of a place inside the leather case.

This, she didn’t understand.

It was technically a map, yes. But not any kind of map she would ever expect to see here.

“It’s a . . . a . . . ,” she stammered. “A gas station highway map?”

Why on earth did her father have an old, cheap, fold-out road map in his prized portfolio?

And most of all, why on earth was it the same old, cheap, fold-out road map that he’d fired her for over seven years ago?

“Why do you have the Junk Box map in your portfolio?”

Nell got up and went into the kitchen, and returned with a generous glass of wine.

Why had he kept it, all this time? She took a long, nervous sip. And especially after what had happened because of it?

The map stared back at her, silent, unhelpful.

It looked the same as the last time she’d seen it, no more faded or weathered, or even opened up since then. The art on the covers of these types of old driving maps was always some kind of Americana: a family smiling and waving outside their American-brand car, a field of bison, sometimes the American flag, midripple in an imaginary breeze. This one had a cabin or lodge of some sort—a simple brown wood building in the middle of a lush valley, framed by a river that ran behind it. Cheap, out of date, and unremarkable.